16.924, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Weigand (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-924. Sat Mar 26 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.924, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Weigand (2004)

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1)
Date: 24-Mar-2005
From: Kerstin Fischer < fischer at nats.informatik.uni-hamburg.de >
Subject: Emotion in Dialogic Interaction 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 14:49:13
From: Kerstin Fischer < fischer at nats.informatik.uni-hamburg.de >
Subject: Emotion in Dialogic Interaction 
 

EDITOR: Edda Weigand
TITLE: Emotion in Dialogic Interaction
SUBTITLE: Advances in the Complex
SERIES: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 248
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1849.html


Kerstin Fischer, University of Bremen

The volume "Emotion in Dialogic Interaction - Advances in the Complex" is 
a selection of studies presented at a workshop in Muenster in 2002 with the 
same title. It comprises 15 papers of varying length (between 9 and 42 
pages) plus a foreword, a list of contributors, and an index.

SYNOPSIS

In her foreword, the editor, Edda Weigand, introduces the main focus of the 
volume: the idea that emotion needs to be studied as an integrative 
component of human behaviour. A major issue is therefore the culture 
dependence of emotion which is taken up in many papers. The foreword 
furthermore outlines the organisation of the volume in three parts: 
Addressing the Complex, which comprises theoretical perspectives on the 
study of emotion, Communicative Means for Expressing Emotion, in which 
mainly different lexical items are being investigated, and thirdly, Emotional 
Principles in Dialogue, which concentrates on cognitive and cultural aspects 
of the use of emotions.

Part I:  Addressing the Complex

In her contribution (Emotions: The Simple and the Complex), Edda Weigand 
sets the stage for the investigation of emotion as a complex phenomenon. 
She begins by arguing against a reductive analysis of emotion by means of 
semantic primitives, drawing on findings on the mirror neuron, for instance, 
to show that even the smallest units are complex, such that "there is no 
simple at the beginning" (p. 5). Similarly, she rejects a metaphor analysis of 
emotion terms because it focuses only on a single aspect of emotion in 
dialogic interaction and isolates a "special compartment of a complex 
whole" (p. 6). A more appropriate approach to emotion, in her view, is to 
study competence-in-performance, which manifests in principles of 
probability, by investigating the human beings' interests, needs, 
expectations which are influenced and shaped by their social and cultural 
surroundings (p. 6-7). She coins this analytical framework a dialogic action 
game. Accordingly, her focus is on how emotions are expressed in 
language use (p. 11), and as a methodology she proposes the comparison 
of different languages, which allows the identification of the particular 
conventions of each language. Besides accounting for explicit means for 
referring to emotions, such as declaring, stating and emphasising, she 
requires her theory to be able to deal with emotion as an accompanying 
feature (p. 17), which involves uncertainty, negotiation, order and disorder. 
Edda Weigand then proceeds by analysing a sentence on a publicly available 
sign that states a quite private affair. Including typographical, linguistic, 
contextual, and cultural factors, she provides an example of an integrative 
account as a dialogic action game. Her approach serves as a framework for 
many other papers in the volume.

Frantisek Danes (Universality versus Culture-specificity of Emotion) 
discusses the relationship between universality and culture-specificity of 
emotion by discussing cognitive aspects of emotion, spontaneous versus 
strategic display of emotion, different triggers (events, states, actions), 
primary versus secondary emotions, and the necessity of having a label in 
order to be able to experience emotions. Moreover, he argues that a 
cultural analysis always means an analysis of a culture's subcultures (p. 29-
30).

Svetla Cmejrkova (Emotions in Language and Communication) also focuses 
on accompanying, paralinguistic, aspects of the communication of emotion, 
using a political debate to carry out a stylistic analysis that a) accounts for 
linguistic and paralinguistic features, b) effects on addressees and 
overhearers, c) norms, and d) genre.

Carla Bazzanella (Emotions, Language, and Context) addresses the problem 
of the relationship between the individual, interactional, and cultural 
aspects of emotion by using a model of context: she distinguishes global 
context, which comprises the external, a priori features of context and 
features like status or social roles, from local context, which is activated and 
constructed interactionally in the course of the interaction. These two types 
of context are proposed to correspond to moral, secondary, and natural, 
individual, primary emotions respectively. Bazzanella furthermore assumes 
a compositional approach to emotions that includes physiological, phonetic 
and prosodic variation, facial expression and behavioural variations (p. 56-
57). These aspects interplay based on the variability of aspects of the local 
and global context.

John E. Joseph (Body, Passions and Race in Classical Theories of Language 
and Emotion), using a dialogue from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice 
as a starting point for an insightful and highly readable philosophical 
inquiry, investigates the relationship between the body, passions, language, 
and race in several philosophical texts, in particular, Aristotle, Epicurus, 
Descartes, Locke, Renan, and Herder, and furthermore contextualises it in 
the Christian thinking of Shakespeare's audience. The questions raised, 
such as how do emotions arise and how do they enter language, how do 
humans and animals differ, how do different human races differ from each 
other, are faithfully investigated in the texts under consideration and gently 
disentangled, leaving us with a clear overview of the development of 
different positions on the relationships involved. Finally, the author outlines 
directions for future research focussing on possible relationships of the 
questions addressed to metaphor, identity and language death.

Part II:  Communicative Means for Expressing Emotion

Karin Aijmer (Interjections in a Contrastive Perspective) discusses the 
interactional and emotional functions of interjections by analysing 
translations from English into Swedish. Corresponding to the 
communicative functions of interjections, Karin Aijmer finds English 'ah' 
and 'oh' to be rendered in the target language as interjections, reaction 
(feedback) signals, expletives, conjunctions, adverbs or not at all. 
Nevertheless, she proposes an emotional core meaning for these words 
(surprise) and explains their communicative functions as due to their 
indexicality, which is also taken to account for their strategic employment.

Wolfgang Teubert (When Did we Start Feeling Guilty?) provides a historical 
analysis of guilt, shame, and Schuldgefühl. The theoretical question behind 
his corpus analysis is whether we need to have a label in order to 
experience a particular emotion. The corpora he investigates are the Bank 
of English as well as the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and other literary 
authors. Drawing on discussions in philosophy, psychology and cultural 
anthropology, he looks at the relationship between social constructedness 
and experiential categories. While the corpus analysis indicates that the 
feeling of guilt is a relatively recent concept, his conclusion is that the 
experience of emotions and their social construction are inseparable.

Valerij Dem'jankow, Andrej Sergeev, Dash Sergeeva, and Leonid Voronin 
(Joy, Astonishment and Fear in English, German and Russian: A Corpus-
based Contrastive-semantic Analysis), in an attempt to "study lexical items 
not just in dictionaries but in use" (p. 163), compare emotion terms 
corresponding to astonishment in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Gogol, as well as 
terms corresponding to joy in Dickens and Dostoevsky, an approach that 
they label 'linguistic psychology'. Their first finding, which they use to 
postulate 'hypothetic euroversals' (p.167), concerns differences in the 
clustering of emotion terms by Hoffmann and Gogol, such that Hoffmann 
combines terms of astonishment with other emotion terms, while Gogol 
does not, and differences in the presentation of emotions, for instance, 
event -> emotion -> reaction (p. 168). The findings are related to the two 
authors' different styles: romantic mystification versus irony (p. 172). 
Similarly, the authors identify different uses of emotion terms related to joy 
in Dickens and Dostoevsky.

Maxim I. Stamenov (Ambivalence as a Dialogic Frame of Emotions in 
Conflict) investigates ambivalent emotions. Since emotions directly signal 
their experiencer which action to take, ambivalent emotions, such as 
German Hassliebe (hate-love), constitute a problem, also with respect to the 
experiencer's identity. Here Freud's model of the psyche with its three parts, 
id, ego, super-ego, can explain the experiencer's ambivalence as "a regular 
way of processing certain types of subjectively significant information in a 
potentially dissociative way" (p. 186).  After these theoretical considerations, 
Stamenow applies his findings to the analysis of Turkish loan words in 
Bulgarian which, contrary to their Bulgarian synonyms, often carry negative 
or ambivalent emotive-affective connotations.

Part III:  Emotional Principles in Dialogue

Michael R. Walrod (The Role of Emotions in Normative Discourse and 
Persuasion) presents an analysis of the expression of emotion with respect 
to the fixed text structure in an instance of a particular kind of normative 
discourse: dispute regulation in Ga'dang. With respect to the different parts 
of the macro structure of the discourse, emotional content and normative 
evaluations are expressed differently, and different lexical choices are 
being made. Thus, the study illustrates the culture- and context-
dependence of emotional expression.

Jörn Bollow (Anticipation of Public Emotion in TV Debates) provides a 
detailed analysis of a TV debate between two German politicians (Schroeder 
and Stoiber) into which he introduces an interesting tertium comparationis: 
TV opinion polls elicited before and right after the TV debate, so that in this 
analysis the suspected emotional features can be indirectly related to the 
audience's judgements of credibility, sympathy, and competence. The main 
findings concern the politicians' strategies in dealing with emotions. Bollow 
succeeds in disentangling different expectations and constraints on 
emotional expression for politicians.

Elda Weizman (Interpreting Emotions in Literary Dialogue) addresses the 
multiple layers of emotional interpretation in literary texts, provides an 
analysis of the first pages of Amos Oz: my Michael. First, Weizman 
establishes an investigation of the emotions named, the co-textual gaps 
and culture-dependent connotations, proceeding in a step-by-step 
example-based analysis. In a second step, Weizman provides a further, 
convincing analysis of the text, this time focussing on the narrator's 
justifications for her emotions, her matter-of-fact style in which she 
presents aspects of her story, and her explication of historical 
circumstances - all of which contributes to an interpretation of distance to 
the emotions talked about. Weizman then interprets this distance as a sign 
of insincerity of the narrator (p. 250), a sign that she has lost her ability to 
feel love (p. 252) (an interpretation I personally could not follow on the 
basis of the analysis presented).

Tamar Sovran (The Author-Reader-Text Emotional Bond in the Literary 
Action Game) uses the same text as Elda Weizman to argue for three 
components of the 'literary action game': a universally shared emotional 
basis which is taken to make readers universally react to the text 
with 'involvement, sympathy and sadness' (p. 259) (which is in fact in sharp 
contrast to a judgement from a reader quoted at the end of Weizman's 
paper), particular and indexical factors, such as cultural knowledge, and 
knowledge about the person of the author, Amos Oz. All three factors are 
taken to increase 'the emotional impact beyond the limits of the text' (p. 
262).

Christian Plantin (On the Inseparability of Emotion and Reason in 
Argumentation) addresses methodological questions in emotional analyses 
of text. His proposal, 'a model of the semantico-textual counterpart of the 
cognitive component of emotion' (p. 268), comprises four aspects: the 
asserting of emotion, the backwards derivation of emotion from the 
description of a physiological emotional state or a typical action, the 
description of possibly emotional events, and situational constraints. The 
latter he illustrates by means of a 'letter to the editor' on a political issue. He 
argues that the emotions of this letter are grounded in cognition, that is, 'in 
the cognitive framing of the situation itself', and that therefore emotion and 
reason cannot be separated.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The main point of the volume is the complexity of emotion in interaction. In 
this context, Wierzbicka's approach is criticised as being reductionistic, and 
furthermore, Frantisek Danes argues that Wierzbicka "takes for granted that 
English words such as 'say, want, good, bad' express universally valid 
concepts" (p. 31), which is certainly the least appropriate criticism of 
Wierzbicka's life work, which has been devoted to the identification and 
justification of the primitives she employs throughout. Nevertheless, it is 
certainly right that emotion is indeed highly dependent on contextual and 
interactional aspects and is construed interactively and online. Wierzbicka's 
work, however, be it as it may, has an advantage that has largely been 
ignored by the authors of the current volume: it is based on a solid, well-
specified methodology.

How do we know of a passage that it is emotional? For some words 
denoting emotions, such as sadness or joy, it may be unproblematic to 
argue that they have to do with emotionality, yet Teubert's analysis nicely 
illustrates how difficult it can be to determine for a word like 'shame' 
whether it refers to an emotion or not, not to mention the problems of 
determining concurrent, accompanying emotionality. One needs a tertium 
comparationis, some method to argue that an expression is emotional 
other than appealing to plausibility. These central methodological issues 
are hardly addressed in this volume (with Plantin as the only real exception) 
and it seems to me that, although it is certainly necessary to 'address the 
complex', the importance of methodological tools to investigate this 
complexity must not be underestimated.

The data investigated are furthermore not what I had expected, regarding 
the title of the book. The data analysed are mostly written data, usually even 
non-authentic, literary examples (which is certainly justified for some types 
of research questions, such as Teubert's), and if spoken, then they are 
extremely monological, such as long statements by politicians in interviews. 
And if in a few cases interactional data are discussed, then the analysis does 
not rest on interactional methodology. Accordingly, with one exception 
(Bollow), works by authors who previously have investigated emotion in 
interaction, for instance, Kehrein (2002), Goodwin & Goodwin (2000), 
Selting (1994), Fiehler (1990), are not referred to in the volume.

Also the composition of the volume is not ideal. With Carla Bazzanella as a 
notable exception, the authors of the volume hardly, and usually not at all, 
refer to each others' work, although in some cases data and objectives are 
identical. There are numerous typos, grammatical errors, and many 
examples have not been translated.

To conclude, while some papers provide interesting ideas and starting 
points, for instance, Weigand's, Bazzanella's, Joseph's and Stamenow's 
theoretical frameworks, other papers rather do not. Thus, although the 
theoretical framework opened up by Weigand and explicitly referred to by 
many authors promises an interesting, integrative perspective on emotion 
in interaction, the application of this approach is often not convincing 
because of a lack of methodology.

REFERENCES

Fiehler, Reinhard (1990): Kommunikation und Emotion. Theoretische und 
empirische Untersuchungen zur Rolle von Emotionen in der verbalen 
Interaktion. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Goodwin M. H. & Goodwin C. (2000): Emotion within situated activity. In: 
Duranti, A. (ed.): Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 
239-257.

Roland Kehrein (2002): Prosodie und Emotionen. Tübingen: Niemeyer 
(Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 231).

Selting, Margret (1994): Emphatic speech style - with special focus on the 
prosodic signalling of heightened emotive involvement in conversation. 
Journal of Pragmatics 22: 375-408. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kerstin Fischer is assistant professor at the University of Bremen. She works 
on methodological issues in the identification of contextual effects in 
language, which includes aspects of the speaker, such as her emotional 
state, as well as of the addressee (in the form of recipient design), and 
aspects of common ground. Her research areas include human-
computer/human-robot interaction, processes of contextualisation, 
grounding and the evoking of common ground, as well as the 
representation of situational knowledge in construction grammar.





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